E3 2015: Wild Emotions; Part 1: Boredom and Mild Interest

Man is asleep, a kid is smelling his armpit,
another guy is checking his phone, a woman is having a good chat with someone.
What do these things have in common?
They're all the things I did at the Microsoft press conference.

I know I haven't written anything about E3 yesterday, but I'm still here! I really would like to write about each conference individually (like what I did in 2013), but unfortunately I have class to deal with and I just don't have the time to write about each conference like that. So instead I have to settle with a retrospective, and my god do I have one.

This year's E3, with the exception of a few things and possibly one of the biggest disappointments in my entire life, was probably one of the greatest E3's I have ever witnessed. Holy shit. So many games, so many things people have wanted for years, have been shown off and given certainty that they exist. I'm always terrible at writing introductions for these things, so let's just get down to it.

The first conference wasn't actually Microsoft's, but it was actually Bethesda's. Technically, it wasn't one of the big conferences, but who cares, Bethesda is pretty big to many people anyway. So one of, if not the first thing they popped out, was apparently a remake of Doom. That's cool, I guess. To give credit where credit is due, Doom is sort of the pioneer in the FPS genre, so there's that. I'm not sure if it "needed" a remake (I don't know if there have been any installments between this and the original Doom), but the original Doom is certainly dated as fuck, so it's nice to see this revision of the original. Next thing I remember was Dishonored 2, which looks nice and all. The thing is, I never played the first Dishonored, so I wasn't as hyped as anybody else was, but one thing that kind of irked me was how one of the designers outright says, "We wanted the player to experience simulation rather than scripted events," yet literally the entirety of the trailer was a scripted event. Then again, it's just a trailer, so I shouldn't be so highbrow about it, I just thought it was a little bit silly and ironic.

They also showed some stuff off The Elder Scrolls Online's latest expansion, and once again, I don't see the appeal of it. I love Skyrim, but I can't see how this franchise would translate nicely into an MMO. Most of the environments and models from what I saw felt very samey to me, but I haven't played the game so I don't have a true word in it. Still, doesn't change the fact that I'm not interested in the game. They talked about a couple of other games which I have entirely forgotten, and then they announced that they are jumping on ship with the strategy card game fad and making an Elder Scrolls strategy card game. Sounds cool and all, and a very good idea as I'm sure plenty of their fans are into Magic: The Gathering, but I'll stick with Hearthstone as I'm not that much into those card games.

I still think sometimes that you play as that dog. Also, marvel at all that brown.

So far Bethesda's presentation was fairly lackluster, yes, but then they came out with the big gun, or shall I say, the Fat Man! Granted, they already announced Fallout 4 before this (which would've been almost as hype as the Final Fantasy VII remake announcement), but still they showed off a lot more than what that trailer showed us. I like to joke that the trailer gave me the impression that you play as a dog, since the dog took up like eighty percent of that teaser. So good on Bethesda for choosing to show off many great details about Fallout 4. They started off, though, talking about how "great" the game looks, and that just made me laugh. It may look much better than Fallout 3, but when you are saying this while I'm seeing stiff model animations and just some bad cases of lighting(?) that the characters look like they are standing in front of a green screen, it just could've rubbed me in the wrong way. Not to mention that the colors still, for the most part, look inspired by what dirt would look like if you threw it in a blender.

Still, I smiled through that as what I was seeing about the gameplay was looking a lot like everything I could have hoped for out of this new game. The character creation has evolved beyond sliders to the point where it's so fine tuned you are literally interacting with the flesh and bone of the character's face, like sculpting. The Cadsworth robot has that wonderful charm the robots have had in the past. There is a bit of dialogue between your character and some guy who just randomly shows up to your house to ask you personal questions about yourself, as you've just so happened to have been luckily selected to move your family to a vault. This leads into the stat selection and stuff. It felt kind of bizarre and unnatural, I would've immediately asked what the Hell was going on, but I guess the ignorant bliss was what they were going for.

The other fantastic thing about this new game that stands out in my mind is the crafting system they have. Everything is so intricate and it looks as if there are thousands of possible things you can make. All the useless bullcrap that they'd throw around in the previous games (like toy cars) are now things you can disassemble for parts to make useful stuff with, which is so intuitive it begs the question why they never did this in the first place. Best of all, though, you can create your own house in the game. Even though they showed us the character making a pretty lame shanty house, that was still a pretty awesome new feature to show off. They also showed that you can customize your own power armor too, that's nice. And of course, they showed quite a bit of gameplay, of namely the goofy combat that has always charmed me. You can blow things up with a teddy bear launcher, for example (I'm not sure if this existed in previous games). All in all, bad graphics aside, I'm really excited for this game. It only took them nearly a decade to get to it already.

With that, that was the end of the Bethesda conference, and following was the first of the Big Three: the Microsoft press conference. Oh boy.

One of these is not like the others (Womb Raider)

I have to give credit where credit is due and say that the Microsoft conference was actually very serviceable. They announced that finally, the Xbox One will have backwards compatibility. That's a good step up over the PS4 and all, although in all seriousness that's something these consoles should've had from the start. That aside though, Microsoft also got to present some exclusives that this console desperately needed. They started off with Halo 5, which looks interesting to me. First off, and this is the main thing that interested me, Master Chief for some reason is now a fugitive in the eyes of the Galactic Federation (gonna use Metroid terminology here because idk what they're actually called and I don't think it's the Covenant). I haven't played Halo 4 so that might explain why I don't understand what's going on, but it still interests me a lot. Also I liked a lot of what I simply saw, this Covenant city felt reminiscent of Halo 2 to me, and they had the classic goofy grunts shouting funny lines. In this demo they weren't playing as Master Chief but apparently a Spartan assigned to hunt Chief down. So the campaigns story is split between these two characters and each leads a squad of Spartans. As far as I know about gameplay they said that apparently it supports up to twenty four player co-op(?), so if that's correct and I'm not remembering it incorrectly holy shit that sounds amazing.

Unfortunately the rest of Microsoft's conference was lackluster to me. A few things got my attention, notably the Recore trailer that followed Halo 5. Honestly if it weren't for the authenticating text that this game is made by some of the creators of Metroid Prime I wouldn't be nearly as interested. It's a pretty trailer and all but I have no idea what this game is supposed to be. I'll certainly be keeping my eye on it though. Another non-big name they premiered was Behind Eyes, and my god what a lovely little game that looks. It's coming out for PC too, but the point of these conferences is to wow me with what these companies are choosing to offer for me, and that certainly snagged my attention. Then of course there is Womb Tomb Raider, which is now an Xbone exclusive. That's good for Microsoft I guess. Recore is also an exclusive, so between those two, Halo 5, and the fact that Square is releasing games for the Xbox now, there is actually a possibility now for me to get an Xbone.

The enigmatic ReCore by former Metroid Prime creators.

The rest of the show was incredibly lackluster though. Every game seemed to me a rehash of each other, all being the same old thing, the same games that follow successful Western formulas of their genre, whether they be action gore shooters like Gears 4 or medieval-esque RPG'S like Dragon Age, both of which, I think, are the big names Microsoft dropped as exclusives. I didn't get to Dragon Age, or whatever that last game is that isn't Forza (the big five here are Womb Tomb Raider, Halo, Gears, Forza, and this game I believe to be Dragon Age), but I did get to Gears of War, which not surprisingly is where I decided to stop. But later on I went to see that particular exhibit because I heard the preview had hilariously bad lighting and by god was I satisfied. I know in real life shadows in dark environments are pitch black but my god I get the sense this guy had to rehearse this like five times to know where the hell he was going.

Twitter weighs in on Gears 4

So I dropped the Microsoft conference because I seriously didn't feel like wasting my time with it anymore. I have school to worry about, so why waste my time. However, I will say though that this year instead of making me angry or laugh at Microsoft in scorn I was quite surprised by how well their lineup was put together and if you're a fan of those familiar Xbox action games well the future looks bright for you.

Update: Just received word that Womb Tomb Raider is a timed exclusive, so... even more reason to find that picture stupid.